by Mike Dash
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Product Description
In the 1630s, visitors to the prosperous trading cities of the Netherlands couldn't help but notice that thousands of normally sober, hardworking Dutch citizens from every walk of life were caught up in an extraordinary frenzy of buying and selling. The object of this unprecedented speculation was the tulip, a delicate and exotic Eastern import that had bewitched horticulturists, noblemen, and tavern owners alike. For almost a year rare bulbs changed hands for incredible and ever-increasing sums, until single flowers were being sold for more than the cost of a house.
Historians would come to call it tulipomania. It was the first futures market in history, and like so many of the ones that would follow, it crashed spectacularly, plunging speculators and investors into economic ruin and despair.
This is the history of the tulip, from its origins on the barren, windswept steppes of central Asia to its place of honor in the lush imperial gardens of Constantinople, to its starring moment as the most coveted--and beautiful--commodity in Europe. Historian Mike Dash vividly narrates the story of this amazing flower and the colorful cast of characters--Turkish sultans, Yugoslav soldiers, French botanists, and Dutch tavern keepers--who were centuries apart historically and worlds apart culturally, but who all had one thing in common: tulipomania.
Amazon.com
For history buffs or gardeners who enjoy more than just digging in the dirt, Tulipomania presents a fascinating look at the tulip frenzy that took place in Holland in the mid-1600s. Beginning as gifts given among the wealthy and educated folk of Europe and Asia, the tulip rapidly became a source of incredible financial gain--similar to today's Internet start-up companies or Beanie Baby collections. Stories of craftsmen discontinuing their trade and focusing on raising tulips for public auction, where they sold for prices comparable to that of a manor house, are astonishing. Poets, moralists, businessmen--it seems everyone was involved at some level. Lack of regulation and poor quality control were just a couple of the details that led to the abrupt crash in February 1637. Tulipomania was the original market bust--people were ruined, debts went unpaid. It was a disaster similar to the stock-market crash of 1929. A brief resurrection of the mania occurred 65 years later in Istanbul, and while it was not the financial obsession Holland experienced, it led to the creation of standards in flower shape and increased the development of new types. You don't need to be obsessed to enjoy this book--an interest in tulips, history, and the futures market ensures that this will be a remarkable read. --Jill Lightner
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Average Customer Review:
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:
 I eat tulips for brekfast., 2008-03-15
On a whole this book was pretty good. It provides a lively, readable introduction to the famed tulip boom and bust in 17th century Netherlands. It offers a number of other enjoyable diversions into other topics - snapshot of daily life in 17th century Netherlands, the rise of the tulip in the Ottoman Empire, etc.
However the book became at times rather redundant and laborious to read. The author would repeat himself and/or contradict himself multiple times over the course of a few pages. The author makes iT sound like that EVERYONE was out there hawking tulips, then he tells us that the tulip trade was at best only conducted on the margins of society, and then back to how EVERYONE is selling off their looms and milk cattle to get into the tulip business.
The suspense it built around the boom in tulip prices, and then when it comes time to explain the bust? Well that was somewhat of a bust (pun very much intended). Granted, I cannot blame the author for a patchy historical record, I was just hoping for a definite resolution as to what caused the bust.
7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
 A Single Flower and the Dutch Golden Age, 2007-02-24
In 1562, most of the first tulip bulbs ever to enter Holland were mistaken for a type of onion and were promptly roasted and eaten. The few that were actually planted in the ground popped up the following spring, to the utter astonishment of Dutchmen (and -women). But it took almost another century for the flowers to drive them crazy.
Why would pious, hard-working Calvinist merchants spend fortunes (few won, most lost) on a flower? The story of Holland's infatuation with tulips in the 1630s is as much a story of the temperate Dutch merchants' uncomfortableness with their own wealth. (The Catholics--they could flaunt their money. Calvinists--they had to repress it.)
The Dutch East India Company was founded in 1602. After a few decades of Dutch ships plying distant seas and returning home laden with exotic goods, the merchants with a stake in the game became staggeringly wealthy. Yet even with their newfound wealth, they were still Calvinists: severe and restrained. They didn't decorate themselves (like those Catholics), so they decorated their surroundings. And what to buy with all that wealth? How about a commissioned portrait of wife and kids (looking severe and restrained)? Check. Nice house? Check. Manicured garden behind house? Check. And to fill that garden?
An exotic flower, first introduced from the Orient, became the object of a national obsession. Entire markets were created just to trade tulips, and the markets were soon swamped with speculators. It was the first-ever futures market. At the height of the tulip-mania, in 1636 and 1637, single bulbs could be sold for 3,000 guilders: enough to buy you one ship, eight pigs, four oxen, sundry other animals, a year's worth of food (good food, mind you), a set of clothes, some furniture and some nice silver cutlery to boot.
So why the tulip? Perhaps it was the Calvinist equivalent of the five-carat diamond ring: an acceptable treasure, neither flashy nor ostentatious, but delicate and natural, created by God. (And perhaps the fact that it bloomed only a few weeks every year meant the neighbors couldn't accuse you of constantly showing off your wealth--another sign of God's own temperance.)
The story of any 'mania' offers insight into the aspirations and anxieties of the culture it affects. And even though Mike Dash's 'Tulipomania' focuses primarily on the short-lived craze for a single flower, it opens a window on the social economics of the Dutch "Golden Age": how Holland's merchant class struggled with its strict faith, its new-found wealth, and its place at the center of a burgeoning world power.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
A classic history of a financial mania, 2006-12-07
I read this book years ago - and it's still with me. Observing the stock market, real estate, or gold, I'm reminded of the lessons it imparts.
How often can you say that about a book?
And it was fun to read - if you like histories, of course.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
If you love tulips and you don't know why...read this book, 2006-07-16
Tulipomania has been on the market for a few years, and I heard of it quite awhile back and finally got around to reading it. Anyone who loves tulips (and does not know why) needs to read this fascinating book.
While living in Amsterdam (1999-2001) weekly I would buy a bunch of 50 tulips for $10 and split the bunch up with friends, I always had them in my apartment, and only now can I identify which ones I was buying. These same friends also shared with me that during WWII, the Dutch were forced to boil and eat tulip bulbs left in warehouses. That's post-modern history of tulips...their origins in the foothills of the Himalayas was a surprise, as was the biological explanation that it is a virus that causes certain tulips to "break" and change colors from one season to the next. These are the flower bulbs that were worth more than their weight in gold, and fortunes were exchanged over possessing the rarest of the rare.
The history of the Dutch is also wrapped up in this very well-researched and written book. Their "economic mindedness" from the the butcher to the banker explains how many everyday people got caught up in "Tulipomania" by buying and selling shares in rare bulbs. As a tulip bulb usually grows larger during the season, it weighs more when dug up in the fall. The Dutch wagered the weight would be higher, and when sold, the extra weight was their profit.
All mania ends in sadness, and when the market for bulbs collapsed, many were left bankrupt, and tulipmania became, once again, only a rich man's game.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:
Tulip Time, 2006-06-02
My fiance bought this book for me at Tulip Time 2005 in Holland Michigan. He was born there and spent his whole life there and I have fallen in love with everything Dutch. I just got to start the book a couple of weeks ago but it has been amazing! It conveys everything about the tulip (which I love)! This book is absolutely great!
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